CIO OPINION

Cloud providers will have to work more closely with their customers to manage sovereignty and compliance with varying rules .

Ivan Pittaluga , CTO at Arcserve

Ivan Pittaluga , CTO at Arcserve , reveals four data protection and management trends to keep an eye on in the year ahead .

1 : The attack surface will continue to expand as ways of working evolve

Your attack surface includes all the possible ways an attacker can get into your company ’ s devices and networks and lock up or exfiltrate your data . So , it ’ s essential to keep your attack surface to a minimum .

The problem is that your attack surface is continually growing as more people work remotely on multiple devices and create more entry points for cybercriminals to carry out cyberattacks .

Worse still , the attack surface is constantly changing . It isn ’ t a single surface but many disparate fragments . Furthermore , control of endpoints is becoming increasingly complex as employees leave organizations and retrieval of equipment becomes harder .

The bottom line is that breaches will inevitably happen . And in the coming year , companies will have to do a better job of recognizing breaches so they can extricate themselves as quickly as possible .

Security and recovery strategies must be more thorough and practiced . As the attack surface expands , those strategies must cover not only your onpremises data but data in the cloud , at the Edge , and everywhere in between .

2 : Data sovereignty will create even greater complexity for data management

As companies have grown globally and become more interconnected , the rules around data privacy have become far more complicated . For example , a company based in Germany may use a US-based company like

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